Dark Eden

in Family he could cuddle up with in his dreams. He never had any choice but to keep going.
    ‘Okay,’ he called when he’d reached the far end. ‘Now this is going to be a lot slower because I’m going to try to . . .’
    He broke off. There was a cry from above and to our left.
    Another leopard, we thought, and a moan went up and down the line. We knew we were just meat now. The leopard didn’t even have to take the trouble of killing us. Give us a bit of time and we’d have done that for ourselves.
    But the cry came again, and this time we could hear it had muffled words in it.
    ‘Hey! Is that you down there? John? Gerry? Tina? Is that you?’
    We looked up. There was a light high up on the snowy mountainside above us. In the centre of the light there was a buck, and on the buck’s back there was a strange shining being, its mask face lit up from below by the lantern on the buck’s head.
    Candy cried out in fear – she thought it was one of the Shadow People come for us before we were even dead – but I laughed.
    ‘Jeff!’ I called out. ‘Jeff!’
    It was my brother, of course, my clever brother. He hadn’t got lost at all!
    ‘I can see you now,’ he called down, while Def picked a way down the slope towards us. ‘I can just barely see you. Don’t go on any further, whatever you do.’
    His voice echoed from rocks over the far side of the valley. We all strained to hear him.
    ‘The snowslug is all broken up down there,’ he called down. ‘Don’t go on that way. This is the way. Up here.’
    He came weaving and zigzagging down the snowy slope.
    ‘There’s trees just over the far side of the ridge, and streams and lots of bucks. You’re walking right past them and you don’t know it.’
    And some people started to laugh, and some to cry, and everybody to talk and talk.
    ‘Wait there, and I’ll come down to you,’ Jeff called.
    ‘Harry’s dick, Jeff,’ John said, as Jeff came up close, ‘are we glad
glad
to see you, mate. I thought we’d had it there, I must say. I thought we’d finally run out of luck.’
    Jeff laughed.
    ‘Well, you haven’t. I’ve got a safe place to take you and it’s not far away. I’d have come sooner, but Def was too scared of the leopard and he refused to turn back. I had to let him rest and calm down and get a bit of sleep, and I needed to calm myself down too so that he’d feel safe with me, and let me lead him.’
    I’d never seen Jeff like that. I’d always known he was smart smart, way more smart than me, but all the same he was just my little clawfoot brother, who stayed on the outside of everything and sometimes said weird things. But right now he was a leader, almost like John. He was barely even a newhair, but he’d become like a grownup man. And I saw that it wasn’t just his cleverness that was special about him, and not just those sharp sharp eyes of his that could see things other people missed: it was also that he was strong. He was
strong
strong, far far stronger than I’d ever be, and in a way even stronger than John.
    ‘Jeff!’ I yelled, rushing towards him.
    I’d forgotten the ropes that still tied me, on one side to Janny Redlantern, on the other to Martha London. As I pulled out of the line, I fell. And then they fell, and then whole line fell toppling over into the snow in front of my brother on his horse.
    Jeff laughed.
    ‘We are here,’ he said. ‘We really are here!’

34

John Redlantern

    We followed Jeff to the top of the ridge and looked down into a little forest at the bottom of a bowl. It was tiny tiny compared to Circle Valley forest, and it didn’t spread up the slopes like forest did back there. All the trees were down at the bottom, except for a few giant trees that stuck up out of the snow on their own, breathing out puffs of steam, and making little pools of light here and there on the steep snowy slopes around the little valley.
    People cheered when they saw the lights of trees down there, and a few people shouted out thanks to Jeff, but we were too weary weary, and too sad, to talk much on the way down, and we stopped pretty much as soon as we were past the outside edge of forest. Tom’s neck, it was good to hear the sound of trees all round us and to have light to see by, but those tall straight trunks, and the lanterns, far out of our reach, high high above our heads, gave the place a lonely feeling. And there was no coloured light, no red or blue – all the lanterns were snow white or pale